East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Shanghai again

I just sent a short story, called Sapiens, to the editor of a science fiction magazine.
A brief, optimistic story set in future Shanghai.
I needed a city damaged by the ocean’s rise due to climate change, and my three choices were (in order) Alexandria, Osaka and Shanghai. Those three cities, after all, will be hit hard by the ocean’s rise – we talk about 17 million people in Shanghai only, in need for a new place to sleep.
In the end I went for the Paris of the East simply because after half an hour I was playing with flood maps of Osaka, I realized it would be a lot faster to use a city whose geography I know from previous research.

This story has also been a great opportunity to divert and focus my anger at a piece that was published recently on the Esquire website, in which it was plainly told that, while it’s good and right to do all we can about the current climatic crisis, it will come to nothing in the end.
We are dead.
Human society is not capable of dealing with this sort of changes.
Just like Cyanobacteria did not make it two and a half billion years ago, for the same reason. We can’t deal with change.And I thought about our old ancestors, dealing with two glaciations with the sort of technology you can put together with two rocks.
I thought about our ancestors that came out of the African savanna and colonized up to the Arctic, and deep into jungles and deserts. I thought about the few of us that lived on the ocean’s shelf or walked on the Moon.
There is this massive, culture-wide guilt trip that’s being fed by certain media. A guilt trip that denies the best of our species, basically to preserve one of our artifacts: the economy.
So I went and wrote a story in one afternoon. Then I revised and I sent it away.
I hope the editor likes it.
It’s time to remember we are sapiens.